PHP at a Crossroads
Navigating Laravel’s future, new PHP releases, and building resilient systems.
As November gets underway, my team is deep in the trenches, pushing out the final big features for the year. It’s that classic end-of-year rush, where every deployment feels critical and system stability is non-negotiable.
Just last week, we had a close call with a third-party payment gateway that started timing out intermittently. It was a stark reminder of why robust, defensive coding is so important. That’s why the article on Resilience Patterns in PHP immediately stood out to me in this week’s issue. It covers essentials like timeouts, circuit breakers, and retries—practical techniques that can turn a potential crisis into a non-event.
On a more forward-looking note, there’s a thought-provoking piece on The Future of Laravel and PHP, which explores the conversation around its popularity with new developers. It’s a must-read for anyone invested in the ecosystem. Let’s dive in!
PHP
📚 The Dangers of Dynamic Method Calls in PHP
In your PHP application, you may sometimes see dynamic method calls being used. This is typically where a method name is constructed at runtime and then called on an object.
📚 Resilience Patterns in PHP: Timeouts, Retries with Jitter, Circuit Breakers, and Bulkheads
This article gives you practical, production-proven recipes — timeouts, jittered retries, circuit breakers, and bulkheads — plus chaos drills and red/black canaries to prove reliability, not just hope for it.
📚 Filament: Hide Submit and Cancel Buttons in wizard
Override the submitAction dynamically in the Page class. If you’re in a CreatePage or EditPage, you can control visibility like this.
📚 How to Integrate MTN Mobile Money in PHP - Complete Guide
In this guide, I’ll show you how to integrate MTN Mobile Money using a modern PHP library that makes it simple and type-safe.
📚 The Classic WordPress Template Hierarchy — The Map Behind Every Them
Let’s take a walk through that map — step by step — and see how WordPress decides what to load.
📚 Generating Random Enum Values in PHP Using Faker
This tutorial assumes familiarity with PHP 8.1 or later, given its native support for enums. Additionally, Composer should be configured in your development environment to manage Faker as a dependency.
📚 Comparing Objects with PHP A Step-By-Step Guide
In this screencast tutorial, I’m sharing how to compare objects and their instances with PHP. We are discussing the comparison operator, the strict identity comparison operator, etc. All in PHP!
📚 Apache Security Guide for PHP Developers
This guide focuses specifically on Apache-level configurations that improve security for PHP developers.
📚 PHP 8.3.27 & PHP 8.4.14 Released!
The PHP development team announces the immediate availability of PHP 8.3.27 & PHP 8.4.14. This is a bug fix release.
📚 PHP 8.5.0 RC 3 available for testing
The PHP team is pleased to announce the third release candidate of PHP 8.5.0, RC 3. This continues the PHP 8.5 release cycle, the rough outline of which is specified in the PHP Wiki.
📚 Mastering the Decorator Pattern: Adding Behaviour Without Breaking Code
When you need to extend functionality without touching existing code, the Decorator Pattern is one of the most elegant solutions in software design.
Laravel
📚 The Future of Laravel and PHP: Navigating Challenges and Opportunities in 2025
As of October 25, 2025, the Laravel and PHP community finds itself at a crossroads. A recent thread on X, initiated by Laravel courses creator and YouTuber Povilas Korop (@PovilasKorop) on October 23, 2025, has ignited a passionate discussion about the declining interest in Laravel among new and young developers.
📚 Zero-Trust Architecture in Laravel Applications
Never Trust, Always Verify: Zero-trust operates on the fundamental principle that no user, device, or system should be trusted by default, regardless of location or previous authentication status.
📚 Facing Blade Template Errors? Here’s How to Fix Them Fast in Laravel
In this article, we’ll explore the most common Blade errors, how to debug them effectively, and a few pro tips to prevent them in the future.
📚 Laravel 12 in Action: 5 Game-Changing Features Every Dev Needs in 2025
Here are the five features that quietly rewrote my daily workflow and why they deserve a spot in your 2025 stack.
In this guide, we’ll go beyond the docs — into advanced exception handling, structured JSON responses, contextual logging, and proactive monitoring.
📚 Laravel Form Handling & Controllers: Building a Registration Form
Instead of building a complete CRUD application all at once, we’ll focus on a single, manageable piece - creating a registration form and processing it with a controller.
This week, I sat down with James Titcumb to talk about his latest work on PHP Pie — a new project designed to modernize and streamline how developers build and run PHP applications.
📚 Mastering the Manager Pattern in Laravel — Build Pluggable, Scalable Architectures
One of the most powerful, yet least discussed, features in Laravel’s design is its Manager pattern.
📚 Redefining Credibility in the Laravel Ecosystem
Anyone can say “I know Laravel.” It’s written on portfolios, résumés, and LinkedIn headlines everywhere. But what does that really mean?
📚 Mastering Laravel Macros: Advanced Real-World Examples
If you’ve ever found yourself repeating the same collection manipulations, query builder patterns, or request validations across your application, macros are about to become your new best friend.
📚 Cost-Aware PHP: Turning p95 Latency into Cloud Savings (Without Breaking Your SLA)
Most teams scale Laravel apps by “feel”: bump the instance size, add two more Horizon workers, toss a Redis node at it — and pray the bill won’t sting.
📚 Clean Service-Action Architecture: A Battle-Tested Pattern for Laravel Applications
Have you ever inherited a Laravel project where a single controller method spans 200+ lines? Where business logic is scattered across models, controllers, and random helper classes? Where adding a simple feature requires touching 10+ files and hoping nothing breaks?
Symfony
📚 Advanced Patterns for Symfony HttpClient: Streaming, Retry, and Resilience
If you’ve worked with Symfony, you’ve used symfony/http-client. You’ve run $client->request(‘GET’, …) and $response->toArray(). This is the bread and butter of API consumption, and it works beautifully for simple use cases.
Symfony 7.3.5 has just been released. Read the Symfony upgrade guide to learn more about upgrading Symfony and use the SymfonyInsight upgrade reports to detect the code you will need to change in your project.
📚 Symfony 8.0.0-BETA1 released
This is a pre-release version of Symfony 8.0. If you want to test it in your own applications before its final release, run the following commands.
📚 October 20–26, 2025: A Week of Symfony #982
This week, the upcoming Symfony 7.4 version merged the last major new features that will be included in this release: deprecated the fluent PHP format for semantic configuration and deprecated config builder generators, added a FormFlow to create multi-step Symfony forms, and improved how errors and exceptions are displayed in the CLI.